This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!

About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

"When I Walk": A young filmmaker documents his journey with multiple sclerosis

“When I Walk” (2012), by Jason DaSilva, is the young
filmmaker’s account of his own battle with multiple sclerosis (MS).

This is an autoimmune disease which tends to strike women
more often than men. It is not the same
thing as ALS (which struck Stephen Hawking).
I recall, sitting in church in MCC Dallas in the early 1980s, when a
woman got up and announced from the pulpit that she had MS, and sobbed with her
partner.

DaSilva has made a number of innovative small films, often
overseas, including “Twins of Mankala” (short, in Kenya), “Olivia’s Puzzle” and
“A Song for Daniel”.

In 2006, Jason started noticing weakness in his legs and was
diagnosed with early MS at age 25. In
December, on a tropical beach, he suddenly couldn’t get up after a plane flew
over them – an incident caught on camera.
Friends helped him up.

The film, sometimes with animation, documents his progression
into disability, needing a walker and then a motorcart, as he lives in the East
Village in NYC (maybe not too far from the Ninth Street Center, which I used to
visit in the 1970s). He tries a kind of
procedure (a catheter from his leg to his neck) to open some veins and reduce
inflammation and it helps only a little.
Still, he travels, to India and then particularly to Lourdes,
France. I visited Lourdes in May 2001,
and saw the pilgrims, and also saw teens do a dance on stage. I had visited Fatima in Portugal in 1999.

There’s a scene in the Guggenheim Museum in NYC, on 5th
Avenue. I visited the Guggenheim in
Bilbao, Spain in 2001 (shown in the 1997 Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies”), but
I don’t think I’ve visited the one in NYC.
I will try to do so the next time I visit NYC. I’ll
need to do that to ride up the Freedom Tower when it opens.

He builds a relationship with a young woman, who says she is
attracted to him because of a certain “softness”. They marry outdoors in a lower Manhattan
park. In fact, I passed such a wedding
one time on a trip to NYC; maybe that
was his! Toward the end of the film,
they have a baby. Actually, Hawking had
biological children. One of Morgan
Spurlock’s films ends with his showing his wife’s delivery.

My own history is one of possibly “mild” disability, being
much “weaker” than a male should be, and possibly relatively unattractive by
some people’s standards. But one time,
around 1972, a particular friend’s wife suggested that I should play a different
chord, grow a beard, hippy bangs, and carve tattoos to attract women. I found the idea offensive, although I didn’t
show it. I was not willing to consider
an erotic relationship that somehow made something “all right”, even if I can
see that this is in some ways a puritanical attitude, with disturbing
implications.

The official site is here (Sundance Selects and Netflix). I watched it on Instant Play, but he DVD is
available. Did I miss this in Tribeca in
2012? I’ve heard of it before. Is the director’s name based on Portuguese
(Brazil), or Spanish (Puerto Rico)?

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of Lourdes Second picture: East Village, mine, 2004

Note WJLA-7 in Washington has an article on pregnant women with MS, and it seems that the baby sometimes shows symptoms of the disease (passed through the placenta) which then resolve, link here. There was also a story of two brothers, one with MS and another with myasthenia gravis, also autoimmune. The brother with myasthenia gravis was treated by thymus removal through a new lathroscopic procedure at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington DC. It would be interesting to see if such treatment could work for MS also. A family friend died of MG (male) at about age 70 when I was growing up.

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